Each internet hosting supplier advertises uptime percentages. 99.9%. 99.99%.
Some declare 100%. The numbers look related however symbolize dramatically completely different quantities of acceptable downtime. Understanding what these percentages translate to in actual time, and what the supplier’s SLA really commits to, is important earlier than you signal a internet hosting contract for a business-critical web site.
The Math: Uptime Percentages in Actual Time
| Uptime | Allowed downtime/yr | Allowed downtime/month | Allowed downtime/week |
| 99.0% | 3 days, 15 hours | 7 hours, 18 min | 1 hour, 41 min |
| 99.5% | 1 day, 19 hours | 3 hours, 39 min | 50 minutes |
| 99.9% | 8 hours, 45 min | 43 minutes | 10 minutes |
| 99.95% | 4 hours, 22 min | 21 minutes | 5 minutes |
| 99.99% | 52 minutes | 4 minutes | 1 minute |
| 99.999% | 5 minutes | 26 seconds | 6 seconds |
The distinction between 99.9% and 99.99% is the distinction between 8 hours of permitted downtime per yr and 52 minutes. In case your internet hosting supplier’s SLA is 99.9%, they’re contractually allowed to take your web site offline for as much as 43 minutes per 30 days with out obligation.
What an SLA Truly Commits a Supplier To
An uptime SLA is just significant if it defines what constitutes a violation, what credit score you obtain when a violation happens, and the way you report and declare that credit score. SLAs which are vaguely worded or require vital proof of outage earlier than credit score is issued are price lower than their headline quantity suggests.
Key questions for evaluating an uptime SLA:
What’s excluded? Most SLAs exclude scheduled upkeep home windows, customer-caused outages, and power majeure occasions. How broadly these exclusions are written determines how a lot of the actual downtime you expertise is roofed.
How is downtime measured? Some suppliers measure from the time a assist ticket is filed. Others use impartial monitoring. A supplier that solely counts downtime after you report it creates a perverse incentive to delay acknowledgment.
What’s the credit score construction? A ten% service credit score for a month of 99.0% uptime on a $30/month plan is a $3 credit score. That isn’t significant compensation for 7 hours of downtime on an eCommerce web site producing hundreds of {dollars} per hour. Consider credit score quantities in proportion to the precise enterprise influence.
How do you declare a credit score? If claiming requires submitting a proper ticket with documentation inside 48 hours of the outage, many purchasers will fail to say credit they’re owed, which advantages the supplier.
InMotion’s 99.99% SLA
InMotion Internet hosting commits to a 99.99% uptime SLA backed by credit-based accountability. The 99.99% threshold means permitted downtime of roughly 52 minutes per yr, or 4 minutes per 30 days. Unbiased monitoring of InMotion’s infrastructure has noticed precise uptime nearer to 99.995% in sustained testing.
The credit-backed construction means violations lead to account credit reasonably than simply acknowledgment. The SLA applies to InMotion’s community and infrastructure, to not application-layer points attributable to buyer code or configuration.
The infrastructure behind the SLA consists of redundant knowledge facilities, community redundancy throughout a number of carriers, redundant energy programs, and proactive monitoring by InMotion’s community operations workforce. When an infrastructure problem is detected, the response is fast reasonably than reactive to buyer tickets.
Associated: What’s Uptime covers uptime infrastructure and enterprise influence intimately | Most Dependable Net Internet hosting Suppliers
The Enterprise Impression of Downtime: Actual Numbers
Downtime price relies upon completely on what you are promoting mannequin. For companies the place the web site is the first income channel, the maths is direct.
An eCommerce retailer producing $100,000 per 30 days averages $138 per hour in income. An hour of downtime throughout enterprise hours prices roughly $138 in direct misplaced gross sales, plus an unknown quantity in future gross sales misplaced to prospects who encounter the error and don’t return. For a web site producing $1 million per 30 days, the per-hour price is roughly $1,389.
For B2B companies and SaaS firms the place the web site drives lead era or trial signups, downtime throughout a paid promoting marketing campaign is especially costly. Advert spend continues whereas the positioning is unavailable, however conversions drop to zero. A $500/day paid search marketing campaign working throughout a 2-hour outage wastes roughly $42 in spend whereas producing no leads.
For companies managing shopper websites, client-facing downtime carries further danger past the direct price: reputational injury, potential SLA violations in agency-client contracts, and the time price of emergency response and shopper communication.
The way to Monitor Your Personal Uptime
An SLA is just helpful when you can confirm it’s being met. Free uptime monitoring instruments like UptimeRobot (free tier checks each 5 minutes) or StatusCake present impartial verification of your web site’s availability from exterior monitoring nodes. These instruments ship alerts when downtime is detected and supply historic reviews that doc the uptime you really skilled.
Configure uptime monitoring earlier than you want it. Discovering a supplier has been lacking their SLA after the very fact, with out monitoring knowledge, makes credit score claims troublesome and gives no early warning for recurrent points.